Light-Creating Crystal May be a New Platform for LED Technology

Scientists may have created a new platform for LED technology. They've created a new, hyper-efficient , light-creating crystal.

In this latest work, researchers designed a way to embed strongly luminescent nanoparticles called colloidal quantum dots into perovskite. Perovskites are a family of materials that can be easily manufactured from solution, and that allow electrons to move swiftly through them with minimal loss or capture by defects.

"It's a pretty novel idea to blend together these two optoelectronic materials, both of which are gaining a lot of traction," said Xiwen Gong, one of the study's lead authors, in a news release. "We wanted to take advantage of the benefits of both by combining them seamlessly in a solid-state matrix."

The result of combining these two elements is a black crystal that relies on the perovskite matrix to "funnel" electrons into the quantum dots, which are extremely efficient at converting electricity to light. Hyper-efficient LED technologies could enable applications from the visible light LED bulbs in everyone home to new displays to gesture recognition using near-infrared wavelengths.

Combining the two materials in this way also solves the issue of self-absorption, which occurs when a substance partly re-absorbs the same spectrum of energy that it emits, with a net efficiency loss. The dots in perovskite don't suffer reabsorption since the emission of the dots doesn't overlap with the absorption spectrum of the perovskite.